1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a commodity information proposal system. More particularly, the invention relates to a sales analysis system, a marketing system and a commodity information proposal system for proposing commodity information to customers, each of which utilizes individual commodity identification information that in turn utilizes a non-contact IC tag such as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag.
2. Description of the Related Art
Application of non-contact IC tags (hereinafter called “IC tags”) to various fields has been expanded in recent years. The term “IC tag” means a tag that can read information of a memory inside a built-in IC chip and to write the information to an internal memory while kept out of contact from a reader/writer. JP-A-2004-246887 (Patent Document 1), for example, disclose sales management by using such IC tags. This prior art technology attaches an IC tag to a commodity, installs readers to shopping cages, entrance/exits, cash registers, and so forth, and reads the IC tags of the commodities by the readers to analyze sales and to conduct settlement processing and security management of commodities.
The prior art described in the Patent Document 1 mentioned above installs the readers as means for grasping purchase actions of customers to the shopping cages and reads the information of the commodities put into the shopping cages. Therefore, the shopping cage needs a power source such as a battery and the weight of the cage increases. This heavy cage weight becomes a large burden to the customers. In addition, a management work on the shop side becomes large, too, because the battery must be charged.
Read log information of the IC tags becomes enormous in shops having a large number of customers but the prior art described above does not execute a weighting processing for the read log information. Therefore, it is very difficult to extract, as marketing materials, valuable information as to which commodities are taken up by customers and as to which commodities are popular though the numbers of sales of the commodities are the same, as marketing materials. The prior art technology further involves the following problem. Shop managers want to promote purchase motivation of customers by proposing the information collected by reading the IC tags as the information of good selling commodities or popular commodities but the prior art cannot satisfy these requirements.
It is an object of the invention to provide a commodity information proposal system that solves the problems of the prior art described above, grasps purchase actions of customers inside shops from information collected by using IC tags attached to commodities, can propose information as a material for marketing about those commodities which are sold and those which are not sold, processes the collected information into a form in match with the intention of shop managers and proposes the information as information promoting purchase desires of customers to the customers.